Over the weeks leading up to the Six Day War, my parents had followed the build-up on the borders on the tiny black-and-white television screen in their cramped flat in Twickenham. They clung to each other in anxiety and mutual reassurance. My mother wrote to her family in Israel. None of them had telephones, and she had no news. She wrote about my brother, Guy, and his talkativeness and about my sister, Illana, who had started to walk; about the progress of my father’s studies, and her acquisition of careful BBC English, but she never mentioned her guilt about leaving; she never mentioned her homesickness.
Each night during the escalation, after my brother and sister had been put to bed, after my mother wished them halomot metukim, sweet dreams (as, later, she would wish me every bedtime, so that my night-times were threaded with the unmappable geography of Hebrew), she went into the tiny living room, and with my father sat down to watch the nine o’clock news, my mother peering, short-sighted, at General Nasser’s familiar face, railing, filling the screen.
Every day, haltingly, she read the newspaper from cover to cover, standing lost in the news, her arms holding the paper wide, as she still does, while my sister napped in the early afternoon. During the late afternoon she would take my brother and sister to the playground. My brother’s English by then, in 1967, was becoming fluent; it had been more than two years since he’d stopped speaking Hebrew. One Saturday morning, a heavy older boy, the plug of mucus in his nose crusted with sand, had stood over him and told him to get off his swing. My brother had looked up, blank and uncomprehending, so the boy had pushed him off. My mother realised then that she would have to switch to English. Like so many Israelis, my mother had grown up with only one language, despite generation after generation of Jewish multilingualism. Without any idea of the riches and possibilities of bilingualism, alone in her mother-tongue, she gave it up. By the time I was old enough to remember, my brother had lost his first language, and Hebrew had been reduced to family secrets and dreams. It lingered only as a private language between my parents, and in my bedtime rituals.
Now over the days the suspense built and built. Perhaps I was conceived in that suspense. Perhaps my parents gave each other some comfort, and what started me was an easing of their distress. Night after night they watched the reports of troops manoeuvring, tanks massing; night after night they heard the calm, reasoned BBC interpretation of angry polemic. Then Israel acted, and their unbearable suspense and anxiety shifted from the potential to the actual.
Certainly for my parents this was a necessary pre-emptive act. To them, the Israeli bombing of Egypt’s fleet of MiGs, those gleaming metal toys lined up, vulnerable, wavering in the heat rising from the tarmac, was the trigger of a war that was going to happen anyway. They could not countenance the other version, that it was an act of aggress-ion, that Israel provoked a war that otherwise would have remained merely manoeuvres and rhetoric. Those airfields lay orderly and still on the morning of the 5th of June, 1967, before the Israeli airforce tore out of the Negev, screaming like the Harriers and Tornadoes that rip through Welsh airspace, causing sheep to abort and women to miscarry. Compared to the romance with the air in these names, how utilitarian the Russian numbered jets seem – MiG-17s, or MiG-21s.
During the six days of the war, my parents’ anxiety focused, narrowed, became not a calculation of risk, but a calculation of potential success, and then of actual success. Perhaps my first cellular divisions were not marked by uncertainty, but instead were flooded, irradiated by relief, then joy, then euphoria. This was how Yitzak Rabin’s widow, after his assassination, remembered the outcome of the Six Day War: ‘This euphoria,’ she kept repeating; ‘this euphoria.’
Maybe that’s when I began, a collision of cells in a flood of euphoria. It’s what I grew up with: Israel idealised, heroic, embattled and honourable, powerful out of necess-ity, and always moral in its deployment of power. It’s what I held onto long into my adulthood, only slightly troubled by the changes in others’ views. But underlying my parents’ fierce relief, bounded by moral rectitude, as they believed then, was my mother’s homesickness.
Homesickness, and the longing for return, saturated my childhood. My mother’s yearning was palpable. Later, when a poem that I wrote about it was published, she asked, ‘But how did you know?’ How could I not have known? Her homesickness was like the unhealing, unhealable wound of the Fisher King. When I read that, in some children’s version of Le Morte D’Arthur, or Gawain and the Green Knight, or Parsifal, and, later, found it redacted in Susan Cooper’s Silver on the Tree, where the mournful, grieving king has been wounded by doubt, I recognised it instantly – how the king begs to be left alone, his voice full of an aching sadness. But though in the end he is relieved of his despair, for my mother there was no such comfort.
That first time my family went back to Israel, in 1978, I hadn’t wanted to go. I was afraid of being homesick. I suffered terribly from homesickness. If I went on a school trip, if I went to a friend’s house, I became distressed – I missed the safety of my mother. For the first two years of school I wept at the window, watching my mother leave, or wept when, having got absorbed in something, I looked up to find she’d gone. I was painfully, totally attached to my mother. Even when I was with her, I missed her, because part of her was always missing – part of her was inaccessible, is still inaccessible, lost inside the cold, hard lock-up of her soul, which the kibbutz exacted from every child as the cost of the ideal, new, egalitarian society.
My parents coaxed me into excitement about travelling to Israel through the promise of new birds. When I was nine years old, all my being was focused on birds. Wherever we went, I ordered places by birds: I navigated by the birds I had seen and the birds I might see. For my ninth birthday, my father had given me the massive Birds of Prey of the World, which I still have. I pored over the AA Book of the Road, with its illustrations of the great-crested grebe’s mating dance, and the coloured, precise cross-section of a green woodpecker’s head, so you could see how its ant-adapted tongue coiled inside its skull. I saved pocket money for months to buy the chocolate-brown RSPB Birdlife of Britain. Now my father let me look through his precious first edition of Henry Baker Tristram’s Fauna and Flora of Palestine. Tristram had a string of letters after his name – LLD, DD, FRS. The pages smelled musty, and the heavy book was old, very old, from long ago in the previous century. There were protective wax papers over the coloured plates, and taxonomic divisions and Latin names I could not understand. I turned the pages carefully, reading Tristram’s odd, old-fashioned descriptions of griffon vultures, and sunbirds, and the grackle, which was named after him, and we spent hours together with the Collins Birds of Britain and Europe, with North Africa and the Middle East, identifying and listing what new birds we might see: the roller, the bee-eater, the hoopoe, bulbuls, Smyrna kingfishers, eagles and wheatears. That battered copy, published in 1972, which my parents have kept all these years, is marked, throughout, with a little inked Star of David, for each species we saw during that month-long trip in Israel in 1978, and the next in 1980, and their later return visits without me, after I’d left home.
My family had moved from London to a village in Sussex when I was a year old; when I was seven we moved again to a house on the edge of Ashdown Forest, where we went birdwatching at the weekends. We travelled to Wales in 1973 and 1974 looking for red kites, and we drove a long car-sick journey through fields and stone walls until at last we came upon a pair of them floating out of the mist somewhere near Tregaron, a sighting that even now, when he describes it, makes my father’s voice reverently hushed. In France we saw flamingos and golden orioles, a bird so glorious and odd with its cat-cry that for a while I adopted Oriole as my middle name. Often on Sundays we would go birdwatching at Weirwood Reservoir, rushing there, once, when we heard an osprey had been sighted. For three months, for a Young Ornithologists’ Club competition, I got up at dawn every day to make a record of the wildlife in a small patch of wasteland and woodland at the edge of the A
22. There is a mound there, planted with ancient yews, and riddled with badger setts. It is the old midden of the nearby manor house, but we called it the burial mound and every spring, when the badgers cleared out their setts, I looked in the fresh heaped earth for bones. I knew the common British birds by silhouette and flight pattern, by their gait or their call; I knew the birds I had not yet seen from the books, and from a scratchy record of the dawn chorus I listened to over and over.
None of this birdwatching could compare to the teeming wealth of birds I saw, at ten, in Israel. Israel was, for me, a landscape known first through its birds. The birds, and my excitement over them, my absorption in them, was also a refuge, because during this first visit, and the subsequent one, my mother, rediscovering and revelling in her own language, became a stranger.
It begins in the aeroplane, as we land. We are given sweets for the landing, and when the plane touches down, a drift of voices begins to sing, and my mother sings too, quietly. It is a melancholy, haunting melody I’ve not heard before, and I look at her, shocked: she is wiping her eyes under her glasses. I have never before seen her cry. Later, when I learn it, HaTikva – The Hope, the Israeli national anthem – and even now if I hear it, it is that moment it evokes: the shock of uncertainty, my mother remote, caught up in feeling something I cannot understand but immediately want to be part of, and my sense of alienation from her, of loss, and yearning.
We walk down the metal stairs and the evening is purple and velvet and warm, and men are kissing the dusty tarmac at the foot of the steps, repeatedly, mumbling, in a kind of passion.
In my grandmother’s seventh-floor apartment in Tel Aviv, I wake up the next day, weeping. In Hebrew, my mother is transformed and unreachable. Unable to understand her, I see her clearly: simultaneously familiar and unknowable, like those around her – people who look like her, black-haired, olive-skinned, who look like me, too, but with whom I cannot talk.
It is my tenth birthday, and I want to be home. My mother’s mother is enormous and loud. She frowns at me as I stand there crying, and asks something about me in Hebrew. She sounds annoyed. I go out on the balcony and look down at the small patch of garden far below. Something is moving there – some brown bird. I can hear the ritual shouts of officers and soldiers being drilled over in a nearby military camp. I hear the long wail of sirens, a different sound from the seesaw of the siren that I know, usually the village constable getting home in a rush through traffic for his lunch. My father has said something about air-raid sirens – the night before he had to explain, patiently, that these were not air-raid sirens but police cars or ambulances.
Seven storeys down, the tiny square of dusty green garden is hemmed in on all sides by the tall apartment buildings, which squat on great concrete legs, and I think I might ask if I can go down to look for birds, but my mother calls me in for breakfast. This is a return of surging un-happiness: breakfast is nothing I recognise as a meal. It is chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, different kinds of white cheese, and yoghurt, and cream cheese, hard-boiled eggs… The milk, poured from a plastic bag, tastes foul, like long-life milk. My grandmother eats with her mouth open, making wet sounds and sucking her teeth.
I meet my grandfather for the first time when we travel a few days later up the coast and inland, onto the Ruler Road and past the prison, past spur-winged plovers and Egyptian vultures, to the kibbutz.
The lenses of my grandfather’s glasses are so thick they give him an amused look, as though his eyes are half-closed in private laughter. We smile at each other a lot but can’t speak: he has no English and I have no Hebrew. There is a great healed scar on his forehead, from when he was attacked and wounded by Arabs. I know it is Arabs who did it, though no one tells me that. His scar fits with everything I have been learning about ‘the Arabs’.
He drives a small tractor with a trailer, and dresses in the dark blue work-shirt and shorts that all the kibbutz members wear, and the kova tembl, the fool’s hat, to shield himself from the sun – it is early April and already hot. In the communal dining room where the adults sit for long hours, talking, my sister and brother and I fidget, uneasy and bored. People in their blue work-clothes keep coming over to us; there is a lot of exclaiming and kissing. My father is no longer Daniel, but Danny. My mother – it hurts me, what has happened to my mother. In Hebrew, incomprehensible, her eyes bright, talking, with people listening to her, she is transformed. I am used to her quietness, her hesitations, her looking to my father to speak. Now it is for the first time my father who is in the background, my mother who is sought out and addressed and kissed, excitedly. These people talk to me brusquely, and kiss me too, and I can understand nothing. I look to my mother for help, but there is some new quality about her that I can’t bear: she is animated, nearly loud, emphatic. I hate it – I want her back. I hate everything: the loud and crowded communal dining room, the smell of bleach and old wet food where the wheeled orange dish-trays clank along the conveyer belt into the dishwasher, and the hot-bleach smell of the steaming cutlery coming out of the dishwasher. Everyone talks loudly; everyone wears blue shirts and trousers and dark heavy boots. In Hebrew everyone seems angry, even when they are laughing.
My sister and I scrape our plates and load our dishes onto the conveyer belt and go downstairs and out from under the ponderous concrete edifice of the central dining room. Even the grass is wrong – thick-bladed, coarse, dry, though it is green. We balance, wobbling, along the narrow wall by the road, our arms spread. Out here passing people stare at us – prolonged stares – but don’t speak. We see pale jays, and hoopoes, and yellow-vented bulbuls, and a small dark bird that might be the tiny, green, iridescent, orange-tufted sunbird.
We spend weeks that spring bird-watching, with my siblings and I competing for the binoculars – the heavy black pair that I can hardly hold, and the lighter brown pair belonging to my mother. My brother is more interested at fifteen in other novelties. My mother, alarmed, smacks his hand down when he looks through binoculars at an army camp. We travel throughout Israel, seeing members of my mother’s and my father’s families, some of whom, on my father’s side, have only recently escaped, with difficulty, from the Soviet Union. We visit sites in the West Bank, which, under Jordanian control, were inaccessible to my parents when they left in 1963. We travel north into the Golan, and to an aunt’s kibbutz in the Huleh valley; we go to see ancient Jericho, and the ruins of Caesarea and Masada. In the Old City in East Jerusalem, we enter the Dome of the Rock, and shuffle forward in a queue to touch the stone, smoothed into cool silkiness. It makes me thirsty, somehow, in the back of my throat. We drive south to Eilat, and into the Sinai Desert – far south along the Red Sea, in what used to be, and subsequently becomes once again, Egypt. The car breaks down several times, or overheats.
Everywhere we go, it is not family, or ruins, or human stories that make the strongest impression on me, but birds. Masada is a bird-of-prey migration, not a site of heroic Jewish resistance to Roman rule: short-toed eagle, spotted eagle, imperial eagle, honey buzzard... The raptors rise on the thermals from the Negev and float past us at eye-level. On the broken walls of Masada there are lines of Tristram’s grackles, large dark birds with orange wing feathers and a haunting cry – Tristram’s grackles, spelled grakle in his Fauna and Flora of Palestine. Beit Hashita, the kibbutz my mother is from, is Smyrna kingfishers and black-winged stilts with red legs, and hoopoes. The Sinai is wheatears, every species of wheatear, and griffon vultures circling, and perhaps a black vulture – and white beaches, and an occasional Bedouin, and the car overheating, and white branches of hard, dead Red Sea coral, which we collect, illegally, and smuggle home wrapped in clothes in our suitcases.
For my mother, birds were a simple delight, but it was different for my father. When I was a child, my father was the bird authority. He had the collector’s condition, which had begun as a boy, when he’d gone bird-nesting with his twin brother along rural hedgerows, after they were evacuated from London because of the Blitz. But t
he mark in a book, the addition to a list – those birdwatcher acts of reduction and ownership weren’t important to my mother. When I was very young and my siblings were at school, she and I would take binoculars and walk up alone through the orchard and the field and in among the high deciduous trees of Ashdown Forest. The forest was a bit of wild and ancient Sussex, hiding remnants of charcoal burning and royal boundary markers. Alone, between the two of us, there was a quiet intimacy. That spring we found the downy round nest of a long-tailed tit. For weeks we watched it woven, and occupied, but when we came back from Israel it was empty. And one time, walking under ancient deciduous trees, we heard the unmistakable call of a wood warbler, and then saw it, brilliant yellow-green, flitting through the thin branches of a stand of young oaks. When we told him, my father made a moue of doubt, but we were resolute. My mother’s certainty was the only small rebellion against my father’s confident bird authority that I recall.
We walked throughout the forest, its broad old beeches and oaks, its heaths and firebreaks, and each part of it was marked by birds: the red-legged hobbies in a stand of Scots pine, tiny goldcrests in the cedars, a blackcap in the clearing near the old midden, and the long-tailed tits’ nest we found in the great tangle of brambles growing over a long-ago fallen fir. In the woods and fields, and working in the garden, my mother was at home in herself, and the clench of homesickness and unhappiness on her would lift. Birdwatching with her in those wild wet places was intimate and intensely private. She was so much part of me, I was hardly aware of her. So when I saw her for the first time transformed, alien and inaccessible in her first language, the attachment tore, and I became aware of myself, separate and alone. Israel had always kept part of her from me, but when I was ten, Israel took her back entirely, and I was bereft.
Losing Israel Page 2